


Worlds Out There

by aces



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/F, Femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-13
Updated: 2007-07-13
Packaged: 2020-10-19 14:53:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20659055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aces/pseuds/aces
Summary: “This was protection, Sam knew. This was as much Ace protecting the civilian as it was Ace being the safety of a friend.”





	Worlds Out There

**Author's Note:**

> For some_stars for a dwfemslash ficathon, who asked for time travel, pr0n, and preferably plotty time travel based upon pr0n. Um. I kinda loosely followed the idea?

The sky was purple here. Not that it mattered, Sam reminded herself, since the sky wasn’t real and she wasn’t really here and, well, none of it was real. None of it was _real_.

Sam kept reminding herself of that.

The sky was purple, but it was a purple blanket with little holes cut out of it for stars, and she was standing on a vast, flat plain that was undulating up and down slowly. It was a cartoon landscape, or something out of a puppet show, and Sam closed her eyes and took some deep breaths. When she opened her eyes again, the sky was still purple, and she still stood on a vast, flat plain, but at least it looked less like an absent-minded Van Gogh had smeared his fingers over the canvas before wandering off to find some absinthe. (Did Van Gogh drink absinthe? It didn’t matter, since this wasn’t real.)

“You can’t think about it like that,” somebody said, and Sam looked around. She was still alone on the vast, flat plain.

“Think about it like what?”

“It is real. You can’t act like it isn’t.”

“Subjectively real or objectively real?” Sam asked, staring straight ahead. She wasn’t going to play games with this other person, and he or she—_she_—could just damned well show up when she was good and ready.

“Oh, please,” if ever Sam had heard an eye-rolling, that was what it sounded like. “Don’t get philosophical on me or I’ll have to bounce you right out of your cartoon Van Gogh landscape and into something _seriously_ weird.”

“Please stop reading my mind,” Sam said patiently.

“Then stop broadcasting,” the other woman said in her ear, and Sam twisted her neck to look.

She was older than Sam, but she was also younger, and she had an odd habit of changing her style of dress every thirty seconds or so, like a slowly rotating screensaver. Eighteenth-century French one moment, twenty-fifth century grunge the next, and then the bravado of a 1980s teenager in black leather jacket covered over in patches and pins and a pair of black DMs. Her hair was long and brown, sometimes pulled back, sometimes hanging down, and she grinned knowingly at Sam.

“You look like you did when you were twenty and inseparable from Chris,” Ace said before Sam could even think _I wonder what I look like to her_, “and before you bother asking, my name is—”

“Dorothy,” Sam said for her.

She frowned. “Dorotheé, if you must,” she said. “In here, though, I’m Ace,” and now she was just flickering back and forth, from 1980s teenager to an older, wiser woman in jeans and practical shirt.

“I wasn’t thinking about Chris,” Sam said.

“You will be,” Ace answered and took Sam’s hand. “This is your first time in Puterspace, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I didn’t think I’d be this weirded out by it, after everything else I’ve done, but—it’s weird.”

She thought about explaining her journey here, the centuries and light years she had crossed from Shoreditch and the Doctor and Sarah Jane and twenty-first century Earth, and she thought about explaining why she was even in here at all, but she had a feeling Dorotheé—Ace—had already caught the gist of it.

“Like any other drug, it’s best to do it the first time among friends, when you’re safe,” Ace told her, and she was just the older woman now, but she had the black leather patch-infested jacket on over her practical shirt. “I remember my first time here,” and the smile on her face made Sam want to fly, and she thought that maybe she really could do that here, “it was a long time ago.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Sam said. She grinned back at Ace. “Technically, it hasn’t happened yet, right?”

Ace’s grin widened, and she pulled Sam forward in order to kiss her. It tasted like cinnamon and chocolate and entropy, and Sam kissed her back, tentatively. Ace’s hand slipped to her breast.

“Mmm,” Sam murmured, half-surprise, half-interest. She closed her eyes, cupped Ace’s face with her hands—“Yeah,” Ace muttered as her mouth ghosted along Sam’s jawline, “I do have pretty nice cheekbones, though I do say so myself”—and licked a line along Ace’s eyelids.

“I wish,” Sam said, but Ace’s hand on her breast distracted her, and she thought she’d lost track of the sentence, but then she felt something against her back and opened her eyes.

A room now, with solid walls on all four sides and a bed in the middle and not much else. “Oh, I like,” Ace sighed into Sam’s ear. “Simple. Woman after my own heart.” She walked backward, heading with unerring accuracy for the large bed, tugging Sam with her.

“But—” Sam started, and then Ace turned her around and pushed her back into the bed.

“But me no buts,” Ace said. “Mission later, shag now. Yeah, and if you do think of Chris now,” she added, “I’ll be annoyed.”

Sam wondered why they bothered with the removal of clothes, since none of it was real anyway, and Ace muttered at her again in irritation and even removed her hands, but Sam apologized non-verbally with the use of her tongue and the inside of Ace’s thigh, and Ace graciously forgave her.

And if Sam ended up thinking about Chris, for one brief but blindingly clear moment, it was only because she hadn’t pulled _that_ particular move since she was twenty and perched precariously on the skeletal frame of an unfinished roof glittering in a sun-drenched desert (thank god for that tarp, or they would have seriously burned themselves), and if their bed suddenly seemed to lose some cohesion and gain some blinding sunlight, Ace refrained from remarking on it. Then again, she was a bit busy at the time, holding onto Sam’s hips and licking a circle around Sam’s bellybutton.

The bed was solid enough later when Sam fell heavy and languid, curled around the other woman and pressed into the forgiving mattress. She kissed Ace’s shoulder, hard and smooth like a cannonball. She’d had enough glimpses of Ace now, seen enough of war and weaponry in Ace’s flickering mindscape to know that she and Ace might not always agree on how best to handle the problems of the multiverse. This was protection, Sam knew. This was as much Ace protecting the civilian as it was Ace being the safety of a friend.

She’d seemed to get younger, Sam had thought, regressing into 1980s bravado as they had laid in bed and kissed and stroked and come, but now she was older and practical again and pushing her hair back into a ponytail as she sat up from the bed. 

“Don’t trust anything,” Ace said, pulling on underwear and t-shirt with efficiency. “Keep control over yourself, especially if you’re going to go where I think you’re going to go. Keep your head down, don’t mess about, and for Christ’s sake pull out if you think you’re in danger.”

Sam sat up, already back in her clothes because she’d decided that if it wasn’t real, then she might as well dispense with the whole re-dressing issue. Ace stared at her, brown eyes hard and cold. “This is real,” she said. “You get killed here, you get killed out there.”

“Stay with me,” Sam said. “You know what this corporation is like—”

“No,” Ace said. “I’m not supposed to be here at all, you know. I’ve bent some rules so far they’re bloody parabolas and I can’t stick around to watch them break.”

“Then why did you come at all?”

Ace hesitated, sitting on the edge of the bed and wearing a patch-infested black leather jacket. She turned and took Sam’s face between her hands and kissed her on the mouth, and she tasted like chocolate and cinnamon and entropy. “Somebody has to look after you lot,” she whispered and kissed each of Sam’s eyelids. “He always forgets to.” She stood up. “I have to go now. You’ve got the hang of this space, better than you did; you’ll be fine. Just watch your own damned back, would you?”

“If you know so much,” Sam said deliberately, “then why don’t you tell me how this turns out?”

Ace frowned down at her, brown hair scraped back and hard lines around her mouth, and still strangely vulnerable in her DMs and jacket. Then she grinned, reached forward to tap the side of Sam’s nose, and walked out the door that conveniently appeared right then. “Dorotheé—” Sam called, jumping off the bed.

She thought she heard a motorcycle motor start up outside and roar away into the distance.

Sam sat back down on the bed for a moment, thoughtful and abruptly tired. But no, she’d plugged herself into this weird, non-real (real) landscape for a reason, and that reason wasn’t going to go away anytime soon.

“Come on Sam,” she sighed to herself, sitting up and letting the bed disappear, “we’ve got work to do.”


End file.
